The traditional technology of champagne making, particularly described on the web page “http://www.champagne-ayalalr/fabrication_eng.html#top” includes the following stages: pressing (the grapes are placed in special presses to yield their juice), winemaking (the first fermentation—transformation of sugar into alcohol), blending (blending wines from different vineyards and different harvests), bottling (the second fermentation—in the definite bottle), riddling or remuage (gathering the dead yeast cells or sediment, also known as lies or lees, which are formed during the bottling, and brought to the neck of the bottle during this stage), disgorgement (the bottle necks are frozen, trapping the sediments in a chunk of ice, the bottles are opened, and the sediments are expelled with the ice by the pressure in the bottle).
The riddling stage, intended to make the sediment deposit slide into the neck of the bottle, prescribes: “During 4 to 5 weeks the bottles are placed at a 45 degree angle, stored on racks and are handled, manually or automatically, about 40 times. They are regularly turned (an eighth or a fourth of a turn) and progressively brought back up to a vertical position. The mechanical riddling can achieve this in about a week, while the manual riddling takes about one month.”
When Veuve Clicquot first developed the riddling system, every step was done by hand. The complete process took usually from six to eight weeks for a batch of about 5000 bottles. Some producers still use this hands-on method. After the second fermentation in the bottle, and after the aging period on the yeast sediment in the bottle, the bottles are taken from their resting place and inserted into large A-frame wooden racks, called pupitres, with the neck of the bottles pointing slightly downward. The sediment at this stage appears as a strip, with many dead yeast cells adhering to the side of the bottle. The riddler is to maneuver the sediment into a manageable lump inside the bottle, and then bring the lees down the bottle into the bottle neck, close to the crown cap closing the bottle.
In order to do this, the following steps are repeatedly performed on each bottle: the riddler manually grasps the bottom end of each bottle; shakes the bottle slightly to dislodge any stuck lees; turns the bottle approximately one-eighth of a turn; raises the bottom end of the bottle slightly; drops the bottle back into the hole in the rack. Such handling of the bottle gradually ousts the sediment into the neck of the bottle, at which point the bottle is almost completely inverted on the rack.
Many champagne sparkling wine producers use modern automated methods to riddle the wine. There are semi-automatic and automatic devices called “gyropalettes”, where a hexagonal metal basket with an inverted cone-shaped base is filled with inverted bottles and occasionally rotated from side to side.
In 1966, Adolf Heck invented and patented the first automatic riddling machine. Korbel has continued to improve upon Adolf's idea, and today it is possible to produce champagne of consistent high quality with the gyropalettes. According to Korbel, the bottled wine is placed upside down in shipping cases that are arranged on automatic riddling racks. These racks gently vibrate the bottles for one hour, four times a day. During the vibration, the cases are gently rocked every two minutes which eventually works the lees down into the neck of the bottle.
Computer-automated gyropalettes accomplish the riddling in batches, using movable bins containing thousands of bottles. Invented in Spain, they became common in all sparkling wine producing countries since the late 1970s. The mechanization allows for saving time, space and production cost for the producers. Hand riddling requires a minimum of eight weeks to complete, whereas the gyropalettes finish the task in less than ten days. According to the article, this application of modern technology also increases product consistency from bottle to bottle. Production cost savings also has allowed the introduction of traditional method sparkling wines into the lower price end of the market where formerly only bulk produced wines competed. However, the gyropalettes are complicated machines, expensive to manufacture, which leads to an increase of the overall cost of champagne.
The present invention further improves the design of champagne making machines demonstrated in the U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 10/453,074, 11/453,517, and 11/543,448, all entirely incorporated by reference, with the purpose of further increasing the efficiency and reduction of costs for machine manufacturing and wine production.